Since it was a short session and a short slide deck, this post provides a bit more background information.

First, what do I mean with Adaptable IoT? Basically, an IoT solution should be adaptable at two levels:

The IoT platform: use a platform that can be easily adapted to new conditions such as changed business needs or higher scaling requirements; a platform that allows you to plug in new services

The application you write on the platform: use a flexible architecture that can easily be changed according to changing business needs; and no, that does not mean you have to use microservices

The presentation mainly focuses on the first point, which deals with the platform aspects that should be adaptable end-to-end at the following levels:

Devices and edge: devices should not be isolated in the field which means you should provide a two-way communication channel, a way to update firmware and write robust device code as a base requirement

Ingestion and management: with most platforms, the service used for ingestion of telemetry also provides management

Processing: the platform should be easy to extend with extra processing steps with limited impact on the existing processing pipeline

Storage: the platform should provide flexible storage options for both structured and unstructured data

Analytics: the platform should provide both descriptive and predictive analytics options that can be used to answer relevant business questions

Before continuing, note that this post focuses on Microsoft Azure with its Azure IoT Suite. The concepts laid out in this post can apply to other platforms as well!

Devices and Edge

There is a lot to say about devices and edge. What we see in the field is that most tend to think that the devices are the easy part. In fact, devices tend to be the most difficult part in an end-to-end IoT solution. Prototyping is easy because you can skip many of the hard parts you encounter in production:

Use Arduino or platforms such as particle.io: they are easy to use but do not give you full access to the underlying hardware and speed might be an issue

To demonstrate that it works, you can use simple and cheap sensors. But do they work in the long run? What about calibration?

You can use any library you find on the net but stability and accuracy might be an issue in production and even in the prototyping phase!

You can store secrets to connect to your back-end application directly in the sketch. In production however, you will need to store them securely.

Using TLS for secure connections is easy, provided the hardware and libraries support it. But what about certificate checks and expiry of root and leaf certificates?

You can just use WiFi because it is easy and convenient.

When you move to production and you want to create truly adaptable devices, you will need to think about several things:

Drop Arduino and move to C/C++ directly on the metal; heck, maybe you even have to throw in some assembler depending on the use case (though I hope not!); your focus should be on stability, speed and power usage.

Provide two-way communications so that devices can send telemetry and status messages to the back-end and the back-end can send messages back.

Make sure you can send messages to groups of devices (e.g. based on some query)

Provide a firmware update mechanism. Easier said than done!

Make sure the device is secure. Store secrets in a crypto chip.

Use stable and supported libraries such as the Azure IoT device SDK for C

Take into account that many devices will not be able to connect to your back-end directly, requiring a gateway at the edge. The edge should be adaptable as well, with options to do edge processing beyond merely relaying messages. What are some of those additional edge features?

Inference based on a machine learning algorithm trained in the cloud (e.g. anomaly detection)

Aggregation of data (e.g. stream processing with windowing)

Launch compute tasks based on conditions (e.g. launch an Azure Function when an anomaly is detected)

Ideally, the edge components are developed and tested in the cloud and then exported to the edge. Azure IoT Edge provides that functionality and uses containers to encapsulate the functionality described above.

Ingestion and management

The central service in the Azure IoT Suite for ingestion and management is Azure IoT Hub. It is highly scalable and makes your IoT solution adaptable by providing configuration and reporting mechanisms for devices. The figure below illustrates what is possible:

Device Twin functionality provides you with several options to make the solution adaptable and highly configurable:

From the back-end, you set desired properties that your devices can pick up. For instance, set a reporting interval to instruct the device to send telemetry more often

From the device, you send reported properties like battery status or available memory so you can act accordingly (e.g. send the user an alert to charge the device)

From the back-end, set tags to group devices (e.g. set the device location such as building, floor, room, etc…)

In a previous post, I already talked about setting desired properties with Device Twins and that today, you need to use the MQTT protocol to make this work. You can use the MQTT protocol directly or as part of one of the Azure Device SDKs where the protocol can simply be set as configuration.

The concept of jobs makes the solution even more adaptable since desired properties can be set on a group of devices using a query. By creating a query like ‘all devices where tag.building=buildingX’, you can set a desired property like the reporting interval on hundreds of devices at once.

Processing

The selected cloud platform should allow you to create an adaptable processing pipeline. With IoT Hub, the telemetry is made available to downstream components with a multi-consumer queue. An example is shown below:

It is relatively easy to plug in new downstream components or modiy components. As an example, Microsoft recently made Time Series Insights available that uses an IoT Hub or an Event Hub as input. In a recent blogpost, I already described that service. Even if you already have an existing pipeline, it is simple to plug in Time Series Insights and to start using it to analyze your data.

When you connect to IoT Hub with MQTT directly, you need to connect with a ClientId, username and password. Those three values need to be set according to Azure IoT Hub specificiations:

ClientId: use the IoT Hub deviceId

Username: use {iothubhostname}/{deviceId}/api-version=2016-11-14

Password: use a SAS token

When you connect with MQTT, you will notice it also works if you just use {iothubhostname}/{device_id}. You will be able to send telemetry to the devices/{deviceId}/messages/events/ topic and receive cloud-to-device messages by subscribing to the devices/{deviceId}/messages/devicebound/# topic.

With MQTT, you can also update a reported property in the Device Twin. You should do that as follows:

Subscribe to $iothub/twin/res/# to receive a message after you report a property; the message will indicate success or failure like a 204 status when a property is updated

Send a message to topic $iothub/twin/PATCH/properties/reported/?$rid={rid} with the properties in the Json payload; {rid} is a value you set to match it up with the message you get back

If I want to set a property called freeRam, I would send the following message to topic $iothub/twin/PATCH/properties/reported/?$rid={rid}:

{ “freeRam”: 27364 }

Although this is easy enough, do not make the same mistake as I did: include the api-version=2016-11-14 in the MQTT username. If you don’t, IoT Hub will disconnect your client because Device Twins are only supported in recent incarnations of IoT Hub. Took me a few hours to troubleshoot…

You can test all this from a client such as MQTT.fx. Install that client and in the settings, add a new connection profile. In the profile, specify the IoT Hub hostname in broker address, set the port to 8883 and set the client to a device Id that exists in your IoT Hub. Also set the MQTT version to 3.1.1 specifically. In User Credentials, specify the username and password and do not forget the api version. In SSL/TLS, enable SSL/TLS. Note: use Device Explorer to create a SAS token for your device from the Management tab.

Next, subscribe to $iothub/twin/res/#:

Then, send a freeRam property to the device like so (on topic $iothub/twin/PATCH/properties/reported/?$rid={rid} where you set {rid} to any value):

Note: to delete a property, send the null value

In Subscribe, you will get the result of the PATCH operation which mentions the {rid} you specified and also reports the version which indicates the amount of times the property was changed. Also notice the status of 204 which means the property was updated.

By the way, if you want to retrieve the twin properties, just send an empty message to $iothub/twin/GET/?$rid={rid}. The result will be the desired and reported properties of the Device Twin in Json:

In the Azure Portal:

Hope this helps when trying to work with Device Twins from a device with MQTT directly (and not the IoT Hub Device SDKs)!

Like this:

Azure Time Series Insights is a new service that makes it very easy to store and visualize time series data. In this blog post, we will create a dashboard that looks like the one below (click to enlarge):

The dashboard has four sections:

Query1: a heat map of events per device; in this case there are 20 devices sending data every 2 seconds

Query2: a line graph with random “temperature” data

Query3: a line graph with both “temperature” and “humidity” data

Query4: a line graph with “humidity” data

The events are sent to an IoT Hub using the following JSON shape: {temperature: x, humidity: y} where x and y are randomized floating point numbers, generated by an IoT device simulator.

Step 1: Create IoT Hub

Install Azure CLI 2.0, and then use az login to login. Use az account list to list your subscriptions and use az account set –subscription name_or_id to set the default subscription. Next, issue the following commands to create a resource group and an IoT Hub (set location to your preference):

As a best practice, create a separate consumer group on the Events endpoint. In the Azure Portal, in the properties of the IoT Hub, click Endpoints. Then click Events and add a consumer group underneath $Default. Click Save.

Record the Connection String – primary key setting of the device or iothubowner Shared access policy. Click Shared Access Policies, and device to find this connection string. It will be in the form of:

You will need this connection string later to configure the IoT Simulator.

Step 2: Create Time Series Insights Environment

In the Azure Portal, click the green + and navigate to Internet of Things. Click Time Series Insights and follow the on-screen instructions. You will end up with:

I selected one unit of the S1 tier which is more than enough for this example.

Step 3: Set Data Access Policy

Even though you created the Time Series Insights Environment, you still need to grant yourself access to the data. Click Data Access Policies and add your user or group and a role of Contributor.

Step 4: Add Event Source

We will add the IoT Hub we created earlier as an event source. Click Event Sources and then click Add. Give the event source a name and set the source to IoT Hub. Then select an IoT Hub from your available subscriptions and do not forget to set the consumer group to the one you created in step 1. If your event data has a timestamp, you can enter the timestamp property name. If you do not specify the timestamp, the event enqueue time set by the IoT Hub will be used.

Note that Azure Time Series Insights also supports Event Hubs as an event source.

In the SasTokens array, replace SharedAccessSignature sr=… with a Sas token that has the necessary rights to submit events to the IoT Hub. One way of doing so, is with Device Explorer. Once installed, copy the connection string from step 1 in the connection string box and click Generate SAS. Copy the Sas token in the config.json file.

With the config.json correctly configured, from a command prompt, start iot-simulator.exe. It will connect to the IoT Hub, create the devices and start sending data every 5 seconds from every device. In the sample config file, you can set the interval in seconds (Interval) and the amount of devices (DeviceNum). To clean up the devices, run iot-simulator.exe –r.

Step 6: Visualize the data

Now go to https://insights.timeseries.azure.com and login with the credentials you used in step 3. You will get a screen to select data. I selected Last 60 Mins from the quick times dropdown and then clicked the search icon:

In the following screen, click Heatmap and then configure the box at the left with a descriptive title. Also select a split by deviceid to have an idea about the number of events per time window per device and to spot devices that stopped sending data.

Now, at the right top corner, click the circle with the four squares. You end up with:

Now click the + in the top, right section. Select a time range again and then, at the left, change the measure from Events to Temperature. Automatically, the temperature will be averaged over the interval size. Change the term (Term 1) to Temperature and click the circle with the four squares again.

The temperature line graph has been added and you can now click the copy icon and create the same visualization for humidity.

Now it’s easy to create the other panel with both temperature and humidity. Give it a go and try out other visualizations. When you are finished, you can click the Save icon and save this perspective. Yep, these visualizations are called perspectives!

It’s still early days for the service and many features will be added in the near future. If you are already working with event data coming into an Event Hub and IoT Hub, it should be easy to add a new consumer group and start analyzing the data with this service.

As you may or may not know, at Xylos we have developed an IoT platform to support sensor networks of any kind. The back-end components are microservices running as containers on Rancher, a powerful and easy to use container orchestration tool. In the meantime, we are constantly evaluating other ways of orchestrating containers and naturally, Azure Container Services is one of the options. Recently, Microsoft added support for Kubernetes so we decided to check that out.

Instead of the default “look, here’s how you deploy an nginx container”, we will walk through an example of an extremely simple microservices application written in Go with the help of go-micro, a microservices toolkit. Now, I have to warn you that I am quite the newbie when it comes to Go and go-micro. If you have remarks about the code, just let me know. This post will not explain the Go services however, so let’s focus on deploying a Kubernetes cluster first and deploying the finished containers. Subsequent posts will talk about the services in more detail.

After installation, use az login to authenticate and az account to set the default subscription. After that you are all set to deploy Kubernetes. First, create a resource group for the cluster:

az group create --name=rgname --location=westeurope

After the above command (use any name as resource group), use the following command to create a Kubernetes cluster with only one master and two agents and use a small virtual machine size. We do this to keep costs down while testing.

Tip: to know the other virtual machine sizes in a region (like westeurope) use az vm list-sizes --location=westeurope

Note that in the az acs command, we auto-generate SSH keys. These are used to interact with the cluster and you can of course create your own. When you use generate-ssh-keys, you will find them in your home folder in the .ssh folder (id_rsa and id_rsa.pub files).

Now you need a way to administer the Kubernetes cluster. You do that with the kubectl command-line tool. Get kubectl with the following command:

az acs kubernetes install-cli

The kubectl tool needs a configuration file that instructs the tool where to connect and the credentials to use. Just use the following command to get this configured:

Running the above command creates a config file in the .kube folder of your home folder. In the config file, you will see a https location that kubectl connects to, in addition to user information such as a user name and certificates.

Now, as a test, lets deploy a part of the microservices application that exposes a REST API endpoint to the outside world (I call it the data API). To do so, do the following:

The above command creates a deployment from a configuration file that makes sure that there are two containers running that use the image gbaeke/go-data. Each container runs in its own pod. You can check this like so:

kubectl get pods

You will see something like:

Run kubectl get deployment to see the deployment. Use kubectl describe deployment dataapito obtain more details about the deployment.

You will not be able to access this API from the outside world. To do this, let’s create a service of type LoadBalancer which will also configure an Azure load balancer automatically (could have been done from the YAML file as well):

kubectl expose deployments dataapi --port=8080 --type=LoadBalancer

You can check the service with kubectl get service. After a while and by running the last command again, the external IP will appear. You should now be able to hit the service with curl like so:

No matter what device id you type at the end, you will always get Device active: false because the device API has not been deployed yet. How the data API talks to the device API and how they use service registration in Kubernetes will be discussed in another post.

In the previous article, Control Sonos with a easy to use API, we configured a Docker container on a Raspberry Pi 3 to run an easy to use Sonos API. I prefer this solution over writing code on the Photon to control Sonos. Now it is time to let the Photon talk to the API on the PI 3 to load a playlist and start playing or to stop playing at the press of a button.

Just create a new app with the Particle Build IDE and call the app SonosCtrl. Then add the following library: HttpClient. After adding the library, make sure you have the following includes:

To actually use HttpClient to make requests to the Sonos API, you will need some variables of specific types:

You will use the request variable to configure the request. When you configure request, you will need to specify a hostname or an IP address. I used the IP address of my RPi 3 (SonosController above).

To configure request:

The above just sets the port and IP address for the request. We do this in the setup() function. When we press a button, we toggle between playing from a playlist or pausing the Sonos:

By setting the request path appropriately, we can easily load a Sonos playlist or pause. See the GitHub page at https://github.com/jishi/node-sonos-http-api for more paths to use. There is much more you can do! Above, we target a specific Sonos Player (Living Room). As you can see, this is very simple to do and keeps the Particle Photon code cleaner. The code is kept pretty simple so no error handling, logging etc… You can find the full code in the following Gist: https://gist.github.com/gbaeke/9c185e82e7f23c0c4c9d803990d3660f. Have fun!!!

In an earlier post, Controlling Sonos from a Particle Photon, we created a small app to do just that. The app itself contained some C++ code to interact with a Sonos player on your network. Although the code works, it does not provide you with full control over your Sonos player and it’s tedious to work with.

Wouldn’t it be great if you had an API at your disposal that is both easy to use and powerful? And even better, has Sonos discovery built-in so that there is no need to target Sonos players by their IP? Well, look no further as something like that exists: https://github.com/jishi/node-sonos-http-api. The Sonos HTTP API is written in Node.js which makes it easy to run anywhere!

And I do mean ANYWHERE!!! I wanted to run the API as a Docker container on my Raspberry Pi 3, which is very easy to do. Here are the basic steps I took to configure the Raspberry Pi:

Above, you see a request to load the Sonos playlist called “car” on players in “Living Room”. The request was successful as can be seen in the response. This command will also start playing songs from the playlist right away. If you want to pause playing:

Great! We have a Sonos API running on a Raspberry Pi as a Docker container with a few simple steps. We can now more easily send commands to Sonos from devices like the Particle Photon or an Arduino. I will show you how to do that from a Particle Photon using the HttpClient library in a later article.

In this post, I will provide an overview of how to use Twilio and Nexmo to send SMSs and voice messages directly from your device. I will use a Particle Photon but this also works from an Arduino, or a Raspberry Pi or basically any other system. The reason for this is that I will also use Temboo, an easy to use service that basically provides a uniform way to call a wide variety of APIs and even helps you with a code builder.

I will use the same basic sketch form earlier examples. This means there is a photoresistor which measures the amount of light but also a button that will trigger the calls to Temboo to send an SMS and a voice message with the current sensor value from the photoresistor.

Let’s get started shall we? You will first need accounts for all three services so go ahead and sign up. They all have free accounts to get started but remember they are all paying services. It’s up to you to decide how useful you find these services.

For Temboo, you will need to provide the account name, app key name and app key. Sadly, in the free Temboo tier, this key is only valid for a month and you will need to manually change it. I added these values as #defines in a header file called TembooAccount.h. Be sure to use #include “TembooAccount.h” in you .ino file. The contents of the TembooAccount.h:

In your .ino file, we’ll create two functions:

void runSendSMS(String body)

void runSendVoice(String body)

When you want to send an SMS or send a voice message, you call the appropriate function with the message you want to send or the text you want translated to speech.

The contents of the function is easy to write because you don’t have to. Temboo provides a code generator for you. When you are logged in, just go to https://temboo.com/library/ and select the Choreo you want to use. For the SMS, you select Twilio / SMSMessages / SendSMS. You will now be asked for parameters for the Choreo:

After providing all the inputs, you will find the code below and then you will pick and choose what you need. You can find an example for SMS and Voice in the following gist: https://gist.github.com/gbaeke/15596e3e2d185eb11720c965ab33e179. The voice Choreo uses Nexmo / Voice / TextToSpeech. Tip: Nexmo can also take input from your phone (like press ‘1’ to turn on sprinklers) and send them back to your device!

To actually fire off the SMS and voice message, we’ll do that when the button is pressed:

As you can see, Temboo and the APIs it exposes as Choreos makes it really easy to work with all sorts of APIs. I have only used Twilio and Nexmo here but there are many others. Again, these are all paying services and the lowest Temboo tier is quite pricey for home users. If you find it a bit too pricey, you can always use the Particle IFTTT integration to achieve similar results.